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New corporate “Blog Council” misses the point of blogging

A coalition of large companies have formed the Blog Council, a private and …

A coalition of large corporations has formed the Blog Council, a private community that aims to provide a venue for major companies to communicate with each other about their strategies and policies regarding blogging and social media. Founding members come from a diverse assortment of companies, including Cisco, Microsoft, Nokia, Dell, and Coca-Cola.

"The Blog Council exists as a forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs," the organization revealed in a public statement.

The Council has scheduled several private events for members and also offers a members-only web forum for private communication. Members will collaborate to find best practices for building an effective corporate Internet presence and develop "metrics programs" that will help companies measure the return on their blogging investments. The Council will also serve as a "united voice to provide the corporate perspective in the blogosphere."

Companies clearly see the potential value of social media as a vector for conveying their messages, so it is unsurprising that there is broad corporate interest in collaboratively exploiting this new form of communication. It even seems like a good idea on the surface, but the approach taken by the Blog Council reflects a basic failure to understand the underlying value of social media.

The success of blogging is based on the transparency and inclusiveness inherent in the Internet community-building model. The Council stresses the fact that the organization is private and that its members are "major global corporations and brands" rather than individuals or corporate employees who use blogs. Creating a highly exclusive group of faceless corporate entities doesn't seem like a good way to foster any kind of meaningful communication or outreach.

But the Blog Council's mission may be less about blogging and more about old-fashioned marketing. The organization's announcement is essentially a press release dumped into a blog entry, the byline of which merely says "Blog Council." There is no human touch except for a quote—which feels highly manufactured—from Blog Council CEO Andy Sernovitz. How do the folks in the Blog Council expect to educate each other about best practices when they don't exercise those practices themselves? And why bother with a public announcement at all for a group that is private and exclusive? It seems like a largely meaningless attempt to say, "Look at us! We're major corporations! And we blog!"

Many of our own concerns are echoed by journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis, who is unimpressed with the emphasis on blogging and thinks that these companies should be looking at open dialogue from a more holistic perspective. He reminds readers that, for modern bloggers, listening is as important as speaking. "[T]he language on the Council site is much about marketing—marketing to us," Jarvis notes. "That's understandable because these are marketing guys and it's also likely true because this is being run by a leader in the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, a group whose existence and name has given me the willies. It implies that they can manage our mouths when, indeed, that's the one thing that we, the customers, are fully in charge of. If they truly realize that we, the customers, are in charge, then that changes the way you comport yourself in this conversation. Again, you listen more than you speak."

Social media necessarily shifts a lot of control into the hands of the general public. Consider the insurrection that transpired when Digg attempted to censor submissions containing the AACS crack, or the somewhat unexpected results of Dell's IdeaStorm experiment. Companies can't expect to control the message when they allow consumers and employees to actively participate in creating that message, which is what blogging and social media is about on a fundamental level. Readers can smell inauthenticity, so attempts to candy-coat the message or misrepresent the source will almost universally cause a backlash. When executives post marketing material in blogs, they usually get a flurry of negative comments, which are then publicly visible—and can't be censored without creating an even bigger backlash.

Encouraging corporate blogging is a good idea, and helping companies find ways to deal with the challenging issues that relate to blogging is also a great idea. But doing things like "developing metrics programs that help deliver measurable ROI from blog activities" are about marketing rather than dialogue, and that is absolutely the wrong direction.